29 November 2011 9:24 PM

The British embassy in Tehran has been attacked. A mob threw petrol bombs, burned the Union flag and at least one vehicle and smashed a portrait of the Queen. Earlier reports said that at the compound where the diplomats live, six were held hostage for several hours – although that was downplayed by the UK Foreign Secretary, William Hague.

In response to this attack Hague said that, notwithstanding the fact that he phoned the Iranian foreign minister to tell him how angry he was, and summoned the Iranian chargé d’affaires to the Foreign Office to tell him how angry he was,

‘I will have such revenges on you both/That all the world shall --I will do such things,--/What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be/The terrors of the earth.’

How the Iranians must be chortling. All those years when they were blowing British soldiers to smithereens through their roadside bombs in Iraq and training up the Taleban to kill British and coalition soldiers in Afghanistan, Iran suffered zero consequences from Britain.

When during 2007 the Iranian Revolutionary Guards seized 15 Royal Navy sailors and Royal Marines and held them for 13 days before releasing them, Iran suffered zero consequences from Britain – whose sailors grovelled to the Iranians instead.

When Iran’s proxies attacked Israel from Gaza and supplied thousands of rockets to threaten Israel from Lebanon, Iran suffered zero consequences from Britain – which attacked Israel instead for blocking the peace process.

All the years when Iran steadily progressed towards building its nuclear weapon in defiance of international law and in open pursuit of genocide against the Jews and regional domination, Iran suffered zero consequences of any significance from Britain.

One week ago, Britain finally got a little bit tougher when, galvanised from its torpor by the International Atomic Energy Agency which astounded everyone by actually telling the truth that Iran was working on producing a nuclear weapon, the UK government banned all British financial institutions from doing business with their Iranian counterparts, including the Central Bank of Iran. To which the Iranians have now responded with violence.

Now Hague is reacting as if that’s the last thing anyone expected. Yet on Sunday, the Iranian parliament overwhelmingly called for the expulsion of the British ambassador. And in that very debate an Iranian MP actually called for the British embassy to be stormed and diplomats taken hostage.

Are we really to understand that, having finally taken some action against Iran that might have an effect, the British government took no steps to protect its diplomats apart from warnings to avoid getting caught up in demonstrations? How can anyone not have had at the forefront of their mind the mammoth US Iranian embassy siege in 1979?

And anyway, what have we been doing maintaining diplomatic ties with Iran in the first place? Why on earth did we not cut them years ago? After all, Iran declared war upon the west in 1979 when the Islamic regime came to power. Since then, there has been virtually no serious terrorist attack against the west which hasn’t had Iran’s fingerprints on it (as I have written before, I have long suspected its involvement in 9/11 too). Britain itself suffered the Iranian embassy siege of 1980 and Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against the life of Salman Rushdie, which drove that writer into hiding for years. Yet successive British governments, along with the US and the Europeans, have behaved throughout as if merely a few rogue actors were responsible for all these attacks, and relations with Iran sailed on pretty well without any serious or permanent interruption.

For some thirty years, Britain and the west have experienced war waged upon them by Iran – but fantastically, have refused to acknowledge this fact. They refused to fight back. They refused therefore also to acknowledge what has been crystal clear for at least the past two decades: that it was never going to be a choice between war or peace with Iran. It was always going to be a choice between fighting that war sooner, when Iran was weaker and the west had more chance of minimising the fall-out, and fighting that war later, when Iran would be much stronger -- and possibly even a nuclear power -- and when the consequences for the west would be that much more terrible.

What the west refused to grasp was that there was never any chance of the Iranian regime seeing sense. That’s because what drives its dominant members at least is not conventional political impulse but an apocalyptic messianism. That means they actively seek to bring about a conflagration -- even if this consumes much of Iran -- since they believe that this apocalypse will prompt the return to earth of a religious messiah figure. They actually want to bring about the end of the world. But the west just didn’t take any of this remotely seriously.

The result has been catastrophic for the world. Iran has been outwitting the west at every turn, aided immeasurably by an American President who extended to these genocidal fanatics the hand of friendship while smashing his fist down on their principal prospective victim, Israel. As a result, Iran has enormously extended its power in the region and become seen there – disastrously -- as the strong horse which must be ridden, while the once-mighty US has become the enfeebled nag that is no longer prepared even to defend itself, let alone anyone else.

For heaven’s sake, when even that milksop Tory Sir Malcolm Rifkind is saying that a nuclear Iran must be prevented and ‘the prospect of military action must be kept on the table’ it really is time to man the lifeboats. Yet William Hague merely shakes his puny fist and squawks about ‘serious consequences’ when an attack on the British embassy takes him by surprise in this thirty years’ invisible war -- which is now rapidly reaching its terrifying denouement.

Share this article:

28 November 2011 8:23 PM

A particularly egregious claim by proponents of anthropogenic global warming theory is that ‘the science is settled’ and that there is a consensus amongst scientists that the atmosphere is catastrophically heating up because of man’s ever-heavier carbon footprint. Egregious because, in a classic bit of circular reasoning, scientists sceptical of AGW have been systematically denied a voice in the press and on the airwaves, their exclusion thus ‘proving’ the alleged ‘consensus’ through their absence.

Until recently, it might have been assumed that the cause of such exclusion by the BBC was simple ideological bias. For the past two weekends, however, David Rose in the Mail on Sunday has been showing that something far worse has been going on. Yesterday, Rose revealed that the BBC was so deeply in the pocket of AGW scientists that its reporting of AGW was utterly compromised.

Trawling through the second tranche of leaked emails from the nerve centre of AGW theory at East Anglia university in ‘Climategate 2’, Rose discovered, for example, that the leading UK research unit on global warming, the UEA’s Tyndall Centre, had spent £15,000 on seminars for top BBC executives in an apparent bid to block climate change sceptics from the airwaves. Last week, Rose wrote a related story about the involvement of the BBC’s ‘environment analyst’ Roger Harrabin in those Tyndall Centre-funded seminars. Yesterday, Rose wrote:

‘The emails – part of a trove of more than 5,200 messages that appear to have been stolen from computers at the University of East Anglia – shed light for the first time on an incestuous web of interlocking relationships between BBC journalists and the university’s scientists, which goes back more than a decade.

‘They show that University staff vetted BBC scripts, used their contacts at the Corporation to stop sceptics being interviewed and were consulted about how the broadcaster should alter its programme output.

‘... BBC insiders say the close links between the Corporation and the UEA’s two climate science departments, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research, have had a significant impact on its coverage.

‘Following their lead has meant the whole thrust and tone of BBC reporting has been that the science is settled, and that there is no need for debate,’ one journalist said. ‘If you disagree, you’re branded a loony.’

The BBC is a publicly-funded broadcaster whose charter commits it to the highest standards of journalistic objectivity. Such revelations might be thought to be a scandal of a high order, no? You would expect them therefore to cause a stir in the rest of the media, no?

No. Today, several stories were published about AGW, not least because of the opening of the Durban conference. We learned from the Times (£) that the fashion designer Dame Vivienne Westwood is to donate £1 million to fight climate change. We learned from the Guardian that £1bn was still available from the government to fund pioneering carbon capture and storage projects (phew). We learned from the Daily Telegraph that the science behind AGW theory ‘continues to strengthen’. Yet as far as I can see, not one word has appeared about the MoS revelations in the mainstream media.

Just imagine if, hypothetically, it had been revealed that the BBC had been quietly paid by the oil industry to shoot down AGW theory through sponsored seminars, vetted scripts and the exclusion of green activists from the airwaves. Or that it had been paid to promote in similar fashion the agenda of American neoconservatives, or bankers and hedge-fund managers, or UKIP, and correspondingly keep critics of the neocons, bankers or UKIP off the air. Does anyone think that following such revelations not one word would be published elsewhere – or would there be absolute uproar?

Merely to pose the question is to realise just how complete is the rout.

Share this article:

25 November 2011 1:23 PM

The excellent Tim Montgomerie makes the point in a Guardian column today that, having headed a minority government for five years, the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper last May led his Conservative party to its first majority in two decades. Montgomerie cites this to help his case that David Cameron called it wrong when he decided to ditch conservative ideas for left-wing ones – an argument which I myself have made repeatedly since Cameron was elected party leader.

But Harper deserves attention on his own account. For he is a party leader who appears to have defied political gravity. As a country, Canada is hardly a byword for conservatism: indeed, it is known for its liberal approach to social issues. Yet Harper not only hung on to power for five years as the leader of a minority government but has now pulled off the feat of achieving majority rule.

Part of the explanation is the fact that the opposition Liberal party simply imploded. But the Liberals previously had cause to believe they were the natural party of Canadian government. So what explains this apparent inversion of the natural Canadian order?

Three reasons, and they are closely linked. The first is that -- providing a very clear contrast to the Liberals -- Harper espoused policies which were free of ideology and connected instead to reality, common sense and people’s lived experience.

Second, Harper’s approach is a principled one, cemented as it is into a clear division between right and wrong, truth and lies and thus standing four-square against the ruinous moral relativism and nihilism of the times.

Third, he has had the courage and backbone to stand up for these principles rather than bending to fashion or intimidation. In short, Harper is a leader not a follower.

That is not to say he doesn’t change his position nor take note of public opinion. He is a politician, after all, not a saint. And he has done some things which I personally think were unwise – such as helping depose Gaddafy in Libya.

But the point about Harper is that he is patently guided in large measure by his passionate concern to defend Canada’s national interests which he understands are inescapably attached to the bedrock freedoms and other values of the west.

He has shown he is not afraid to take positions which are unpopular with much of the rest of the world, such as downgrading the importance of multilateral institutions or his unflinching support for Israel which cost Canada a seat on the UN Security Council.

He has shown consistently that he understands the civilisational battle in which the west finds itself but which his fellow western leaders minimise or deny.

Unlike the UK, US and other western nations which appear to be suffering from the political equivalent of auto-immune disease, Harper demonstrates that he knows who are Canada’s friends and who its enemies. The result is a bullish stance which provides a stark contrast with the wimpish hand-wringing by the US, UK and Europeans. Two weeks ago, for example, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird declared :

‘Canada will continue to work with its like-minded allies to take the necessary action for Iran to abandon its nuclear program . . . It is not a question of if, but to what extent, we will act.’

To a large extent, Harper’s foreign policy is founded upon principle. He told Maclean’s magazine that global politics is a ‘struggle between good and bad’ and his actions would be guided by ‘moral clarity.’ At his party’s convention last summer, he said:

‘Strength is not an option. Moral ambiguity, moral equivalence are not options, they are dangerous illusions.’

At home, although he long ago accepted that the battle over gay marriage was lost, he has shown he understands the need to reverse the left’s ‘long march through the institutions’ by, for example, de-funding a range of radical pressure groups and supporting more mainstream ones.

The fundamental reason for Harper’s stunning success is that – unlike the callow Cameroons who have succumbed to the linguistic legerdemain of the left -- he really is a politician of the centre-ground. He does not kow-tow to fashionable left-wing opinion but connects instead with the conservative instincts of the public – the true centre-ground of politics. Indeed one might say that, far from defying political gravity Harper’s success is due to the fact that he does not deny it, because he identifies so strongly with those whose feet remain firmly on the ground.

As a former Canadian Conservative Party staffer Sebastian Way wrote last summer, Harper is also immeasurably boosted by the healthy state of his country’s finances, which to be fair is the result of prudent economic policies going back some two decades during which time the Liberals were in power.

British Conservatives can only dream of such propitious economic circumstances – not to mention majority rule. But the lessons for them of Harper’s success are staring them in the face, if only they could actually see.

Stephen Harper is a gold standard politician. In a world run by political pygmies, he stands out as a true statesman. It may be more than the Canadians who give thanks that he is up there on the world stage in the terrifying months ahead.

Share this article:

23 November 2011 5:35 PM

The violence in Egypt has continued to escalate as the demonstrators out on the streets insist that the army council step down immediately. A brief truce brokered by clerics earlier today appears to have collapsed. There is no doubt that Egypt’s military regime has behaved, and will continue to behave, with great brutality. But as I wrote here two days ago, Egypt is between the devil and the deep blue sea. Bad as the military regime may be, the most likely alternative of a Muslim Brotherhood regime would be worse. The army cracks down on dissent, which is bad enough; the Islamists, however, crack down on the freedom just to be.

The Egyptian military regime seems more than a little uncertain about what to do, as well it might be. For it too is between a rock and a hard place. If it allows the planned parliamentary elections to go ahead on November 28, it is likely that the Muslim Brotherhood will gain power. If it postpones the elections, however, that would enrage the protesters even more.

The head of the army council, Field Marshal Tantawi, has said the elections planned for five days hence will go ahead and the presidential election will be brought forward to next summer. He has also floated the idea of a referendum on the army’s role-- presumably on the assumption that the silent majority of ‘Middle Egypt’ would vote to keep the army in power in order to keep the Islamists out. None of Tantawi’s proposals, however, has pacified the protesters who are clearly on a roll.

The Muslim Brotherhood, however, is said to be happy with Tantawi’s assurances. Indeed, from their point of view what’s not to like? The elections will probably bring them to power. To make matters even more complex, the Brotherhood has been steadily making inroads into the army itself. So it’s shaping up to be not just army v protesters but army v army. Either way, therefore, the Brotherhood wins.

Egypt is the issue where democracy meets sentimentality head on. For just as those Egyptians who yearn for true democracy and human rights are probably heading for a most terrible reality check, so those in the west from David Cameron downwards, who so naively bought into the fantasy that deposing Mubarak would lead to democracy because the protesters were on Twitter and Facebook, will eventually have to face up to the fact that in Egypt there will be no good outcome. The alternatives are a bad outcome that is disastrous for the west, and a bad outcome that maintains a fragile equilibrium for the west.

Of course people’s sympathies are with those at the receiving end of the Egyptian army’s tear gas, rubber bullets and worse. When it comes to public image, men in braids and shades cannot compete with civilians being mown down while crying out for democracy.

But sentimentalised democracy – elections without the prior heavy lifting of the establishment of free institutions – is the route not to freedom but yet more abuses of power. And the brutal fact is that if the army council departs the Egyptian stage, the Islamists will take power – and then the outcome will not just be a snuffing out of human rights for the Egyptians but a whole new ballgame of threat for the west.

Share this article:

21 November 2011 4:51 PM

Listening to Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague on BBC Radio’s Today programme this morning, I nearly fell off my chair.

Hague was being asked about the escalating mayhem in Egypt, where as of this morning some 13 people had been killed over the weekend as the regime savagely cracked down on protesters. Egypt appears to be gripped by a spiral of violence (the situation has worsened during today, with the death toll at time of writing reportedly having reached 35). The protesters want an end to military rule; the army council appears to believe that only it itself stands in the way of a government dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood or other Islamic extremists. It may well be right.

Yet asked about the descent into violence of the country where the UK government had hymned the imminent dawn of democracy, Hague said that the UK would not take sides in this fight between Egyptian protesters and the army council. Well why not? After all, it took the side of the protesters against Mubarak merely on account of his repressive regime and without an apparent second thought about the make-up of that opposition. Then Hague said the UK took the side of democracy. Pressed further on these evidently evasive replies, he conceded that the violence was ‘of great concern’ – but promptly added that it was going too far to say that hopes were fading for democracy in the Arab world:

‘“We do have these problems in Egypt but elections are about to take place and we have seen successful elections in Tunisia, a new government is now being formed in Libya, important reforms are taking place in Morocco and Jordan. And so we should remain on the optimistic side of what is happening in the Arab Spring, albeit there will be many conflicts and difficulties on the way.’’’

Such Panglossian complacency is astonishing. The violence in Egypt is the direct result of the toppling of Mubarak that Hague’s government helped bring about. In both Egypt and Libya, where the UK helped provoke regime change, the likelihood that Islamists hostile to the west will come to power looks extremely high.

If they do so, it will be through the very ‘democracy’ that Hague so piously invokes – which is not democracy at all, in any meaningful sense of the word, merely elections. In the absence of the necessary preconditions of democracy – rule of law, independent judiciary, free press and institutions of civil society – elections can merely bring another set of tyrants to power (as happened with Hamas). With the only alternative to such an Islamist government in Egypt likely to be the army council, the words devil and deep blue sea come to mind.

Hague also finds optimism in Tunisia and Jordan. But Tunisia’s ‘successful elections’ brought the once outlawed Islamist al-Nahda Party to power. As for Jordan, King Abdullah is nervously responding to the seismic changes in the region by reaching out to his mortal foes in the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1999, Jordan expelled Hamas leaders for activities harmful to the state. Yet now, Jordan’s Prime Minister says this was ‘a mistake which must be rectified’.

Why the sudden love-in with these sworn enemies? Because everywhere in the region relatively moderate Arab leaders can see that, far from promoting the flowering of true democracy and human rights the ‘Arab Spring’ is bringing the Islamists to power – as Lee Smith has dubbed it, in a deeply alarming ‘Muslim Brotherhood crescent’. And in the Arab world, everyone goes along with the strong horse – which the UK, with consummate perversity, has helped make even stronger.

Only someone who is extremely naive, wilfully blind or an utter fool could possibly be optimistic about the outcome of the current tumult in the Arab world. Just what planet is William Hague on?

In a letter to the Corporation a cathedral official, Nicholas Cottam, has reported:

‘“Desecration: graffiti have been scratched and painted on to the great west doors of the cathedral, the chapter house door and most notably a sacrilegious message painted on to the restored pillars of the west portico.

“Human defecation has occurred in the west portico entrance and inside the cathedral on several occasions. Noisy interruption has occurred to spoken and sung Christian services, after repeated requests for quiet. Foul language has frequently been directed at cathedral staff. Noise has frequently carried into the cathedral to the extent that services have been difficult to sustain in any meaningful way.”

‘Cottam added that alcohol “and other stimulants” appeared to “fuel the noise levels day and night”.

The cathedral authorities are thus recording grossly uncivilised, utterly antisocial behaviour which, in their own words, is desecrating the holy space of St Paul’s Cathedral. And yet, as we all know, the same cathedral authorities have refused to take action to end this affront to decency in their own churchyard. They have washed their hands of it and in effect dumped the entire mess into the lap of the City of London Corporation, so that the church can continue to show that its own heart bleeds for the poor.

Not only is this egregious hypocrisy, but it tells us more clearly than ever before that when it comes to defending a civilised society against its wreckers – indeed, when it comes to defending the church itself against sacrilege and desecration – the Church of England will be on the wrong side.

Share this article:

18 November 2011 1:24 PM

Despite – or perhaps because of – the barbaric repression perpetrated by President Assad of Syria upon his people, with an estimated 3,500 having been killed since the popular uprising there began some eight months ago, the opposition to the regime is getting stronger.

On Wednesday, a group of army defectors called the Free Syrian Army reportedly fired machine-guns and rockets at an air force intelligence base outside Damascus. Clearly, the fact that the army seems to be splitting in this way is a significant development and suggests that Syria – where Assad remains backed by Russia and China -- is now heading inexorably for a civil war and an appalling bloodbath.

Why is the army peeling off like this? Maybe, as has been suggested, because it simply cannot stomach the unspeakable atrocities being inflicted upon the population, including upon women and children.

Maybe also it has been galvanised by the behaviour of the Arab League, which has amazed the world by abandoning its habitual passivity in tacit support of the repressive status quo and instead suspending Syria and threatening sanctions if Assad does not allow international monitors into the country.

There are a number of reasons why the Arab League, led by Qatar, has suddenly sprung into life like this. First, the revolutionary energy unleashed by the ‘Arab Spring’ needs to be managed if other regimes are not also to go down like dominoes.

Furthermore, as Amir Taheri explains in the Times (£) today, the League is filling the vacuum left by the collapse of the US under President Obama as a global power broker -- most obviously of all in his appeasement of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also his failure to deal with the Islamist regime in Turkey which is currently eyeing up Syria as a strategic prize.

The League wants to stop Turkey’s President Erdogan from his apparent wish to dominate the region as a second Ataturk; even more desperately, it wants to halt Iran’s steady march to regional domination through a ‘Shia Crescent’ stretching from the Gulf to the Mediterranean and encompassing Syria and Lebanon.

The conclusion by the Arab states that the US is now a ‘weak horse’ and thus must be circumvented should itself be a source of intense worry for the free world at this self-induced and dangerous marginalisation of its supposed leader -- not least because this has also pushed a number of relatively quiescent Arab states into cosying up to Iran, on the basis that if no-one is going to defeat the ‘strong horse’ then they have no alternative but to clamber into its saddle instead.

The Arab League initiative highlights in turn the utter uselessness of the UN, where last month the Security Council failed even to pass a resolution that merely hinted at sanctions against Syria.

And it also shows up the perverse grandstanding of the UK, US and France which almost certainly will end up having helped replace the relatively tamed Mubarak of Egypt and Gaddafy of Libya by Islamists committed to war and terror against the west while doing virtually nothing about Assad of Syria, who as Iran’s satrap has long posed a mortal threat to western interests from both terrorism and Syria’s own attempts to build a nuclear weapon.

Indeed, even worse than that the Obama administration has once again been strengthening the Islamists by backing the Syrian National Council which is dominated by Islamic radicals. Such stupidity is almost beyond belief, since the Syrian opposition is in fact more likely than other ‘Arab Spring’ countries to replace the status quo with a relatively reformist regime rather than an Islamic tyranny. This is because only some 60 percent of Syrians are Sunni Muslims, and they are opposed by the Alawite, Christian, Druze, and Kurdish minorities who are deeply suspicious of Muslim rule.

So would the fall of Assad be good for the west? Because of all these complexities and imponderables, that question is very difficult to answer. Yes, it would weaken Iran and provide the opposition to the regime there with a much needed boost. Nevertheless there is still a risk that, however terrible Assad is for the west, what follows him may be even worse.

But on balance, since Assad is an undoubted mortal enemy of western interests it cannot be in those interests for him to stay in power. As ever in the Arab and Muslim world, there are no good outcomes – only less bad ones.

Share this article:

17 November 2011 11:57 PM

Baroness Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, is rapidly becoming a priceless guide to what to think. That is to say, whatever position she adopts is an excellent indication that the opposite view must be correct. For her misjudgements are as egregious as they are multiplying.

This is the woman who, as head of MI5, presided over the spectacular failure of that agency to grasp the threat from home-grown UK Islamic extremism, leading to the debacle of the 7/7 terror attacks on London in 2005. Two months ago in her Reith Lecture, she expressed the asinine view that Islamic terrorists were impelled to destroy free societies such as Britain because of their frustration at not having been brought up in free societies.

Now the Daily Telegraph reports that, along with her fellow members of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy Reform, Lady M-B believes that the current war on drugs is not working and that it is time to consider decriminalising possession of small quantities of narcotics.

Groan. For the umpteenth time, there is no war on drugs in the UK. On the contrary, what there is instead is a refusal to enforce the law against drug use in a coherent, consistent, and effective manner -- a failure of policing on the ground disastrously amplified by lethally idiotic decriminalisation mood music constantly tinkling from the great and the un-good who, for a variety of different reasons including the less than intellectually rigorous desire to prevent their own drug-taking offspring from accruing criminal records, are incapable of doing anything other than parrot drug legalisation propaganda.

The Telegraph reports:

‘Baroness Meacher, chairwoman of the All [Party] Parliamentary Group said there were clear examples abroad showing appropriate regulation of drugs can help cut crime. She said: “I think we need to look to the evidence. We have evidence from a lot of different countries about what works rather better than what we do in the UK.

‘“The Czech Republic and Portugal have decriminalised possession and use of small quantities of drugs. They have lower levels of problem drug use, lower levels of use of these drugs among young people, lower cocaine use, lower heroin use. It's fairly clear that you do quite well if you have decriminalisation, so that's one of the policies we think needs to be looked at.”’

But this is rubbish. As Manuel F. Pinto Coelho, Medical Doctor of the Association for a Drug Free Portugal has written (after a similar BBC report last year):

‘Drug decriminalization in Portugal is a failure… There is a complete and absurd campaign of manipulation of facts and figures of Portuguese drug policy which Matthew Hill [BBC News] appears to have “bought”…

‘The article says that the number of newly reported cases of HIV and AIDS among drug addicts has declined substantially every year since 2000 (907) until 2008 (267), quoting a Portuguese Institute IDT´s official.

‘As a matter of fact Portugal remains the country with the highest incidence of IDU-related AIDS and it is the only country recording a recent increase. 703 newly diagnosed infections, followed from a distance by Estonia with 191 and Latvia with 108 reported cases. We’re top of the list, with a shameful 268% aggravation from the next worst case (EMCDDA – November 2007)

‘The number of new cases of HIV / AIDS and Hepatitis C in Portugal recorded among drug users is eight times the average found in other member states of the European Union. “Portugal keeps on being the country with the most cases of injected drug related AIDS (85 new cases per one million of citizens in 2005, while the majority of other EU countries do not exceed 5 cases per million) and the only one registering a recent increase. 36 more cases per one million of citizens were estimated in 2005 comparatively to 2004, when only 30 were referred ”(EMCDDA - November 2007).

‘Since the implementation of decriminalization in Portugal, the number of homicides related to drug use has increased 40%. "Portugal was the only European country to show a significant increase in homicides between 2001 and 2006." (WDR - World Drug Report, 2009)"With 219 deaths by drug 'overdose' a year, Portugal has one of the worst records, reporting more than one death every two days. Along with Greece, Austria and Finland, Portugal is one of the countries that recorded an increase in drug overdose by over 30% in 2005".(EMCDDA – November 2007).

‘The number of deceased individuals that tested positive for drugs (314) at the Portuguese Institute of Forensic Medicine in 2007 registered a 45% rise climbing fiercely after 2006 (216). This represents the highest numbers since 2001 – roughly one death per day - therefore reinforcing the growth of the drug trend since 2005(Portuguese IDT – November 2008).“Behind Luxembourg, Portugal is the European country with the highest rate of consistent drug users and IV heroin dependents”. (Portuguese Drug Situation Annual Report, 2006.)

‘Between 2001 and 2007, drug use increased 4.2%, while the percentage of people who have used drugs (at least once) in life, multiplied from 7.8% to 12%. Cannabis: from 12.4% to 17%. Cocaine: from 1.3% to 2.8%. Heroine: from 0.7% to 1.1%.Ecstasy: from 0.7% to 1.3%. (Report of Portuguese IDT 2008)“There remains a notorious growing consumption of cocaine in Portugal, although not as severe as that which is verifiable in Spain. The increase in consumption of cocaine is extremely problematic.” (Wolfgang Gotz, EMCDDA Director - Lisbon, May 2009)’

‘The reality of Portuguese drug addiction has been blatantly tampered with. The statistical results have been insidiously manipulated by institutions controlled by the government. The Portuguese IDT goes on distorting the numbers and manipulate minds.’

Meanwhile, a fresh head of stream is building up to undermine the UN drug laws, the basic international instrument behind the goal common to all civilised countries of preventing and eradicating the use of narcotics.

The LibDems (of course) are stepping up the pressure on the Tories to decriminalise drugs, and are pushing the false Portugal line.

Today, the All Party group started a two-day meeting in the House of Lords in conjunction with two organisations committed to drug policy liberalisation, the Beckley Foundation and the Drug Policy Commission, to discuss

‘the goal of reforming global drug policy, including amendments to the UN Conventions.’

The Beckley Foundation is headed by Amanda Feilding, whose main claim to fame is that she ‘trepanned’ her head – drilled a hole in her own skull with an electric drill, apparently to alter her state of consciousness. Readers can see pictures of her performing this procedure here. She has extolled the benefits of trepanning thus:

‘“Over the next four hours I had a kind of feeling like the tide coming in, a soft flowing feeling. … the ego had stopped talking”. As to how it feels today Amanda has said, “It’s not an ecstatic feeling at all, but it’s very slight rise in the level of the floor of the psyche to the floor of childhood.” and “If one puts the adult norm of consciousness at zero and the LSD users at one hundred, then the childhood level and that attained by trepanation is thirty, and the level of cannabis is around fifty to sixty.”’

Lady Meacher and the former head of MI5 not only have the distinction of apparently sharing the same view of drug policy as a woman who has bored holes in her own skull but also with President Santos of Colombia, the name of whose country is synonymous with the narcotics trade. President Santos, the Guardian gushes, has emerged as

‘the leading voice on the international political stage calling for a major rethink on the war on drugs’

because he is suggesting decriminalising marijuana and cocaine. But his position is incoherent. He supports such decriminalisation in order to smash

‘the violent profit that comes with drug trafficking’

but nevertheless he

‘would never legalise very hard drugs like morphine or heroin because in fact they are suicidal drugs’.

Leaving aside the fact that cannabis and cocaine harm both users and others unfortunate enough to have anything to do with such users, as well as posing a threat to society in general, if President Santos thinks decriminalisation will eradicate violent trafficking then how can he not support decriminalising heroin as well?

Moreover, when George Soros’s Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy (LACDD) advocated drug decriminalisation a couple of years ago, this position was denounced by Colombia’s own Interior Ministry which warned against legalising drugs or weakening the state’s action against the drug trade in any way. Yet this is the very weakening that President Santos, along with Baronesses Meacher and Manningham–Buller, the trepanned Amanda Feilding, George Soros and Uncle Tom Legaliser and all are intent on bringing about.

There are many deep flaws in the arguments for drug legalisation -- including the fact that the only way of ending the criminal black market in drugs, which Lady Meacher believes decriminalisation would achieve, would be to make all narcotics available absolutely free and available on unlimited demand.

But the bottom line is that legalisation would mean more people on drugs, more addiction, more disease and death and more violence, antisocial behaviour and harm to the rest of society. The campaign to undermine the UN drug laws is being promoted by some very bad people indeed and a large number of useful idiots. We need drug legalisation like... well, like a hole in the head.

Share this article:

15 November 2011 11:55 PM

The co-chairman of Britain’s Conservative Party, Sayeeda Warsi, has delivered a speech about antisemitism to the European Institute for the Study of Antisemitism. I am sure that Baroness Warsi means well. I am sure that she is personally genuinely opposed to bigotry and prejudice in any form. I would therefore like to be able to say it was a fine speech. I cannot do so. Despite much in it that was worthy and unexceptionable, in one vital respect it was a travesty – made no more palatable by the fact that many Jews subscribe to precisely the same lethally misguided misapprehension.

This revolves around the comforting but mistaken notion that Jews and Muslims stand shoulder to shoulder against the same threat by racists and bigots. It’s the argument that says ‘antisemitism = Islamophobia’. And it’s the claim that there is nothing intrinsically threatening to Jews within Islam.

All three notions are false. All three notions are promoted by many Jews. All three were to be found in Baroness Warsi’s speech.

She said:

‘The ugly strain of anti-Semitism found in some parts of the Muslim community arose in the late 20th century. The point is that there’s nothing in our history which suggests that hatred between Muslim and Jews is inevitable.’

This is total rubbish. Muslim persecution of the Jews started in the 7th century with the birth of Islam and has continued ever since. It is true that down through the decades persecution of the Jews by Christians was more savage and barbaric than by Muslims. It is also true that there were periods when Jews prospered under Muslim rule. But the so-called ‘golden age’ for Jews in Muslim lands was very short indeed. The true history is a general story of humiliation, persecution and pogroms.

The great medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, no less, was forced to flee his native Cordoba in Spain after it was conquered in 1148 by the Muslim Almohads, who gave the Jews a choice of conversion, death or exile. In his Epistle to the Jews of Yemen written in about 1172, Maimonides wrote of the news of compulsory conversion for the Jews in Yemen having ‘broken our backs’ and ‘astounded and dumbfounded the whole of our community’. The Arabs, he said, had ‘persecuted us severely and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us’. ‘Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase and hate us as much as they...’

Is there really ‘nothing which suggests that hatred between Muslim and Jews is inevitable’? This is what I wrote in my book, The World Turned Upside Down:

‘The Qur’an says Islam came before Judaism and Christianity, and was the faith practised by Abraham who was a Muslim. (3:67-68). It refers to Islam as the religion of Abraham many times (2:130, 135; 3:95; 4:125; 6:161.) It teaches that Jews and Christians corrupted their Scriptures so Allah sent a fresh revelation through Mohammed. This cancelled out Judaism and Christianity and brought people back to the one true religion of Islam that Abraham had practised.

‘After the Jews rejected Mohammed, the Qur’an says the Jews were cursed by Allah (5:78) who transformed them into monkeys and pigs as punishment (2:65, 5:60, 7:166). It accuses the Jews of corrupting their holy books and removing the parts that spoke of Mohammed (2:75, cf verses 76-79, 5:13). It says the Jews were the greatest enemies of Islam (5:82), that both they and the Christians want Muslims to convert (2:120), that the Jews start wars and cause trouble throughout the earth (5:64, cf verse 67) and even that they claim to have killed the Messiah (4:157).

‘As the historian of religion Professor Paul Merkley observes, the Qur’an declares that the whole of Jewish scripture from Genesis 15 onwards is full of lies...When the Jews refused to accept Islam, Mohammed denounced them as not people of faith. The outcome was the eradication of the Jewish-Arab tribe called the Banu Qurayza. Unable at first to break them, Mohammed entered into a truce with them which he broke, following which he slaughtered the entire Jewish population. Unlike the wars between tribes in the Hebrew Bible which remain merely a historical account with no practical application today, the eradication of the Banu Qurayza is constantly alluded to by the Islamists, for whom it remains an exemplary and timeless call to arms against precisely the same enemy and with similar tactics.’

Baroness Warsi said that Jews were currently targeted by the far left and the far right. So they are. But she omitted to say that they are also targeted by Muslims well beyond the groups she singled out -- Muslims Against Crusades, Islam 4 UK and Al Muhajiroun. Obliquely, she refers to Muslim Judeophobes as

‘...religious fanatics. The people who claim faith drives them to acts of hatred...but who in reality are nothing more than bigots, who hijack their faith to justify their acts.’

But Muslim hatred of Jews, as Andrew Bostom notes most recently here, is rooted in mainstream Koranic exegesis (someone should give Baroness Warsi for her birthday a copy of Bostom’s monumental The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, more than 600 pages of meticulously documented Islamic Jew-hatred in both the religion and its history).

‘Nothing which suggests that hatred between Muslim and Jews is inevitable’? The late Sheikh Tantawi, the Grand Mufti of Al Ahzar University in Cairo and the most prominent and influential cleric in the Sunni Muslim world, used passages from the Koran to depict Jews as enemies of God, his prophets and of Islam itself. As the US media monitoring group CAMERA has noted, Tantawi wrote:

‘Qur'an describes people of the Book in general terms, with negative attributes like their fanaticism in religion, following a false path. It describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e., killing the prophets of God, corrupting his words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people's wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their […] deep rooted lasciviousness.

‘Later, after quoting some from the Koran, Tantawi writes “This means that not all Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims; the bad ones do not.” (Legacy, page 394).

‘Matthias Küntzel, author of Jihad and Jew Hatred: Islamism and the Roots of 9/11, provides some other detail about Tantawi He writes that “Tantawi, the highest Sunni Muslim theologian, quotes Hitler’s remark in Mein Kampf that “in resisting the Jew, I am doing the work of the Lord.” Küntzel continues: “He praises The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, noting without the slightest trace of sympathy that “after the publication of the Protocols in Russia, some 10,000 Jews were killed.”

‘Tantawi made a number of other troubling statements. For example, in 2002, Tantawi declared that Jews are “the enemies of Allah, descendents of apes and pigs.” The following year, Tantawi issued an edict declaring that Jews should no longer be described in such a manner, apparently under pressure from the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

‘While Tantawi did condemn the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 he later affirmed terrorism against Israelis. In 2002, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), reported that Tantawi “declared that martyrdom (suicide) operations and the killing of civilians are permitted acts and that more such attacks should be carried out. Tantawi's positions were posted on http://www.lailatalqadr.com/, a website associated with Al­ Azhar.”’

To repeat – Sheikh Tantawi was the most prominent religious authority in Sunni Islam. Does Baroness Warsi class him also as a bigot who hijacked Islam to justify his hatred?

Jews cannot stand shoulder to shoulder with Muslims against attacks by bigots because a disproportionate number of Muslims reportedly harbour or even act upon prejudice against Jews. Reports by the Community Security Trust over the years persistently suggest that, while most attacks on Jews are carried out by white people, between a quarter and a third of such attacks where the perpetrators’ appearance has been noted are carried out by people described as Asians or Arabs. Opinion polls have also shown that nearly two-fifths of Britain’s Muslims believe that the Jewish community in Britain is a legitimate target ‘as part of the ongoing struggle for justice in the Middle East’; that more than half believe that British Jews have ‘too much influence over the direction of UK foreign policy’; and that some 46 percent think that the Jewish community is ‘in league with Freemasons to control the media and politics.’

There are Muslims who truly abhor this hatred of Jews amongst their community -- groups like Muslims for Israel, for example, who are true fighters against bigotry, and truly brave. But in order genuinely to condemn something, you have to call it out for what it is – as do Muslims for Israel -- openly and honestly. Those who condemn anti-Jewish hatred while refusing properly to identify its perpetrators are not in the business of fighting bigotry. They are doing something quite different – to put it at its most charitable, trying to build bridges between communities in order to defeat hatred.

Of course, such bridge-building is in itself a noble aim. But if in the cause of building bridges between one community and another such people deny or sanitise the hatred of one of those communities for the other, they will inevitably, if inadvertently, end up strengthening that hatred – especially if at the same time they damn those who do tell the truth about this as bigots whose voices must therefore be silenced. Which is what, believe it or not, elements within the Jewish community are shamefully doing. And which is why it is perhaps not so surprising that Baroness Warsi is, shall we say, a trifle confused.

Share this article:

Newt Gingrich has now overtaken other Republican candidates in the race for the presidential nomination. According to PPP polling, in a startling come-back from the political dead Gingrich has now overtaken Herman Cain and Mitt Romney while the rest of the field have been reduced to also-rans. Republican voters in Iowa, which Gingrich has to win over in order to stay in the race, appear to be listening to him with interest.

This Lazarus-like resurrection surely illustrates the depths of the Republican problem. Gingrich was written off long ago because, in addition to a messy private life, his career imploded in even worse controversy. In 1997 as Speaker of the House of Representatives, he was reprimanded and fined for ethical wrongdoing after admitting failing to ensure that the financing for two projects would not violate federal tax law and by giving the House ethics committee false information.

Yet despite all this Gingrich has now become the front-runner for the Republican nomination. The reason is pretty obvious. First, he has performed strongly in the TV debates between the contenders; and second, virtually every other breathlessly announced front-runner has promptly disintegrated under scrutiny, either through intellectual limitations, flip-floppery or allegations of sexual wrongdoing.

Herman Cain has now distinguished himself by scoring heavily in both the first and last categories, with lurid claims of sexual harassment now superseded by his excruciatingly embarrassing incoherence when asked on TV whether he supported the removal of Gaddafy from Libya. The only other one left standing seems to be Romney -- and his own ducking and diving on various issues hasn’t gone down too well either.

Well might heads be scratched over the Republicans’ calamitously weak store of presidential material. But the reason why they are fielding one crash-and-burn artist after another is surely that the Republican party has itself crashed and burned, in that it has lost its sense of purpose.

Ever since the defeat of Soviet communism, western conservatives have been in a state of woeful intellectual and moral confusion. What they failed to grasp was that while state communism was dying the threat to the west merely transferred itself to the cultural and social sphere through the twin attacks by secularism and left-wing ideology.

The west is now suffering from the baleful legacy of the ‘Boomer generation’, those born after World War Two and who turned with such nihilistic glee on the consumerist society that had nurtured them. As this article by Walter Russell Mead suggests, the Boomers created a culture of narcissism that has expressed itself on both left and right through failed or destructive economic and social policies. The resulting self-centred and debauched culture has created a vacuum into which the enemies of civilisation are steadily marching.

Like their Conservative party cousins in the UK, US Republicans have failed to grasp that the task for conservatives today is as stark and as urgent as it has been ever since Edmund Burke articulated it in the face of the French revolutionary terror: to defend life and liberty in the free world against its enemies both within and without.

Faced with the apparently overwhelming power of the left-wing media and intelligentsia, weaponised through their Orwellian hijacking of the language of the centre ground and their career-ending bullying and intimidation of all who dare to disagree, many conservatives have succumbed to the cultural mind-bending without even realising they have been in effect captured by the enemy.

The reason why Newt Gingrich is striking such a chord is principally because he does realise all this very well, and so delivers a very clear message and the hope of a return to reality. He gives expression, in other words, to an authentic conservative voice. Gingrich is very smart, a serious thinker and a good communicator. He is also extremely tough and resilient. He is without doubt a Big Beast in the political jungle -- beside whom Mitt Romney, his chief rival, seems a diminished figure.

There is still much to play for and maybe Gingrich will fall by the wayside yet again. Without doubt, he has his flaws. He is a loose cannon, a polariser rather than a healer and with a dubious ethical record. But in a poor field it is possible that Gingrich’s strengths will bring him out on top. For these are desperate times. If Obama wins a second term, not just America but the free world will be in an even more desperately dangerous plight from an American President who is effectively aiding the enemies of civilisation (read Barry Rubin to see how the First Narcissist is busily empowering Islamists everywhere). Desperate times like these need a Big Beast not just to defeat Obama but to defend the free world.

So far, the Democrats have been able to sit back and watch the entertaining spectacle of the Republican multiple pile-up. However, if Iowa comes out for Gingrich expect to see great volleys of poison-tipped knives flying his way.